This Family: 'Deserves to be HUGE' - MARIAN KEYES by Kate Sawyer

Author:Kate Sawyer [Sawyer, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529340730
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2023-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Emma walks toward the table and trails her hand across the tablecloth. It’s a bit of an odd set-up, the mismatch of chairs, the higgledy-piggledy cutlery and glassware. But it is beautiful. With the light from the pond, and the festoons and the sunflowers. So many sunflowers, all along the table and on the bunting too.

What’s that about? Something to do with Ukraine? She’s never known them to be a particular favourite of her mum’s. Or maybe it’s to do with that painting?

Her stomach churns, the cigarette smoke suddenly feeling horribly foreign in her lungs, and she coughs violently. She tosses the cigarette onto the grass and puts it out under the ball of her foot, then takes off her jacket and throws it into the armchair. She does a double take: it’s that horrible threadbare old thing from Granny’s ancient three-piece suite. Why on earth did they allow her to bring that here? There ought to have been some sort of sacrificial burning of it when they packed up her house and shipped her over to Mouser Lane. Maybe Emma could instigate it this evening.

There’s still a part of her that’s itching for destruction.

Her eye falls on the crumpled paper bags where Michael left them. She can see that the brown paper handles are damp. Michael’s hands must have been sweating when he was talking to her.

Good, she thinks. I hope he’s sweating. I hope he’s shitting himself.

A baby’s cry rings out from the house and she stiffens.

The baby. Michael and Phoebe’s new baby. A little boy. Named after Grandad.

She’s always loved that name. Bertie.

She pulls a candle out of one of the bags. Immediately she can see that they are the wrong colour yellow, a dark ochre, almost brown. Not even close to the vivid yellow of the sunflowers that she knows her mum would have envisaged if she asked Michael to find yellow candles.

That’s going to go down like a ton of bricks.

She smiles to herself, remembering how pleased Michael seemed when he was chatting away to her, before he realised that she wasn’t Phoebe.

Leaning across the table, she pulls one of the candlesticks towards her and wedges the diarrhoea-coloured candle into it, then pulls her lighter from her pocket. She curves the palm of her hand around it. The flame catches, she can feel the heat of it against her palm, and as she removes her hand it barely flickers but just burns yellow, orange, blue and green at its very centre.

There isn’t a whisper of wind. She didn’t notice before, but now she has, she can’t imagine why she didn’t immediately. The place is so still. The tree is motionless, the straw-like grass, the golden stubble of the wheat in the field beyond, all still, waiting, holding their breath.

Emma places the candle onto the table and closes her eyes, and, for a second, she is as still as everything around her.

Then she inhales, puts her handbag over her shoulder, and turns towards the house.

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